Easy Investing

THE BACKSTORY

When Aaron Froug wasn’t studying or buying and selling on eBay, he dabbled in startups at the University of Florida. There he met Bo Starr, who was working on a business idea focused on building a community around stock market investing. Over pizza, the students decided to join forces.

But when you’re building a startup, the first iteration is rarely what you end up with. “We kept going through different concepts, until one day, my sister and I were at a Starbucks and the barista said that’ll be $12. She laughed and said, ‘I should own stock for how much I shop here,’” Froug recalls. That’s when it hit him: “Why can't investing be as easy as the things you are already doing in your life?”

About 162 million Americans are invested in the market, but they’re not exactly a diverse set. Most (87%) make more than $100,000, and the biggest share of investors are Baby Boomers. “There’s some data that shows that the average person develops a relationship with money at 16 years old, but the average person just getting started investing is still a 32-year-old white male with at least a $60,000 salary,” Froug says.

Seeking to build an app for the younger generation, Froug and Starr interviewed students and others in Gainesville in 2017 and discovered that while most believe they should be investing in the stock market, they don’t for three reasons — they don’t think they have enough money, they don’t think stock investing is designed for them, and they don’t understand it. “We realized there were emotional and psychological barriers to investing,” Froug says.

Just like learning to ride a bike, the best way to learn is to just try it, they believed. “We wanted to build something that felt the easiest, best and most human way to get started. Like, hey, I already own an iPhone. Why not own Apple? I get a Chipotle bowl every single day. Why not own Chipotle?” Froug explains. “We're here to reverse how the investing industry usually works, where people feel like they have to learn a lot first.”

The duo named their financial technology startup and app Grifin, which stands for “Greatest Revolution in Finances Now.” Grifin connects to a user’s bank, credit or debit card, and enables users to automatically invest as little as $1 for each purchase they make at places they shop or do business that are public companies, such as restaurants, grocers, retailers, utilities, streaming services and ride-sharing companies.

THE GROWTH STORY

Navigating the highly regulated financial technology industry, Grifin launched the first version of the app in 2021, raised early funding and released a marketing video on TikTok that went viral. “It was cool to see how many people got excited about it. I think the top-liked comment was, ‘I will own all of McDonald’s,’” Froug recalls.

Growing a startup comes with low points too — a big one was realizing they needed to ditch a third-party provider that marred the experience they were building for their users. The Grifin team took a year — an eternity in startup time — to move to a new platform they would build and safely transfer over all accounts by mid-2023.

“The low moments are the greatest learning opportunities, and it’s also where the highest highs have always followed, those moments where we’ve had to figure things out and take risks,” Froug says, explaining that they took all their learnings and redesigned and relaunched their app in early 2024. “We wanted to build an app that felt calming and different, not a bunch of graphs and changing colors and moving numbers. We just wanted to create something that looked nothing like the rest of the finance industry, because we believe that the next great finance company will be inherently non-financial.”

Of course, not all places that one shops may be good investments. The co-founders say the app enables people to gain confidence experiencing investing and learn some basics — including about portfolio diversification — without risking a lot of money. What’s more, a Grifin feature allows users to decline to invest in any company. They can also pause investments and set limits on how much they invest.

Last fall, Grifin began charging a membership fee: $36 annually or $5 monthly. Moving to a membership model “changed the trajectory of the business,” allowing Grifin to build more products, including some utilizing AI, and release more features, including one allowing people to add companies to their portfolio even without shopping there. It also opens opportunities for employers to provide Grifin as a benefit.

Froug and Starr are co-CEOs. They employ eight people full-time, mainly engineers and marketers, and use external teams for legal, compliance and customer service. So far, the Tampa-based startup has raised $11.5 million in venture capital. By the end of 2024, Grifin had more than 350,000 users and had been attracting about 1,000 new downloads a day on average, Froug says. Though originally built for millennials and Gen Z, Grifin also found a fast-growing market among women in their 40s to 60s.

WHAT’S NEXT

In the plans is a crowdfunding round so users can become owners of Grifin “and come along with our success,” Froug says. Ownership could include benefits such as lifetime memberships, free merchandise and early access to new releases. Grifin also is considering creating a discounted student version of the app, enabling family accounts, expanding educational resources, building a social platform so people can learn from one another, and exploring working with public companies to offer small rewards to their shareholders.

“And then it would be really exciting to introduce people at different stages to new concepts such as ETFs (exchange-traded funds) … so it’s like, hey, now that you own stock, here are other ways to think about investing and expand on that journey,” Froug says. Looking further ahead: “It will be amazing to one day have people use the Grifin app to automatically invest in Grifin stock — when we go public.”